"We are getting what our deeds deserve": A Refutation Of The Thief On The Cross

Luke 23:39-41--"One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: 'Aren't you the Christ?  Save yourself and us!'  But the other criminal rebuked him.  'Don't you fear God,' he said, 'since you are under the same sentence?  We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.  But this man has done nothing wrong.'"


The thief who spoke these words, called Dismas by some, uttered this sentence with great difficulty as he struggled to breathe, tortured and naked and nailed to a cross for the amusement and deterrence of others.  Did he deserve to be crucified?  Despite the fact that in Mosaic Law the Bible clearly and universally condemns tortures of the kind involved in Roman crucifixion, many Christians seem to think that crucifixion was just in the case of this thief.  Or, at least, I have rarely noticed any moral judgment of the Roman ideas of justice in sermons focusing on the contriteness and redemption of the thief.  In sermons and conversation about this stage of the gospel narratives, most Christians seem very concerned with emphasizing the innocence of Jesus and the significance of his crucifixion with regards to soteriology.  Sometimes speakers and authors will add that the thieves deserved their crucifixions in order to exalt Christ's innocence, refusing to acknowledge Biblical prescriptions about justice and the morality of particular punishments for crime and generally implying that God approved of their crucifixions but not that of Jesus.  And this is Biblically inexcusable, not to mention extremely fallacious.

I need to quickly summarize moral epistemology before I proceed.  Conscience is a purely subjective tool that, alone, proves nothing about the truth or falsity of a moral claim, and, since there can be no morality in a universe without a deity, as there would be no moral authority in its absence, God must reveal moral truths to humans for them to have moral knowledge (Romans 3:20, 7:7, 1 John 3:4, Deuteronomy 4:2).  Whether or not someone feels crucifixion is just or unjust has nothing to do with whether or not it is.  I will prove that the Bible condemns practically everything about Roman crucifixion.  But first, I will quote what others have said about the myth of deserved crucifixion.

I found this posted this online as part of a narrative take on the crucifixion of the repentant thief:


"In the eyes of the law I deserved that cross.

I caught a glimpse of the man I’d seen earlier along the road to the hill, the man who had caught me and had me arrested.
In his eyes I deserved that cross.

In my own eyes I deserved that cross [1]."


Another online author writes:


"Luke confirms this view when one of the crucified says, 'We are getting justice, since we are getting what we deserve. But this man has done nothing improper.' Jesus does not contradict him and say that crucifixion isn't just and no one deserves to be tortured. He doesn't say that the cause of Judean sovereignty is right. His answer is that today he'll be with him in a shaded garden – a Greek phrase meaning paradise.3 Jesus canonizes the rebel who says that Jesus was never one of them – Jesus never opposed Roman authority. Crucifixion isn't wrong per se, according to Jesus, but they have the wrong guy [2]."


I'm uncertain if this author truly knew at the time of writing this what crucifixion actually consisted of or what Mosaic Law allows and condemns, but if he didn't, then he is displaying extreme ignorance of Biblical justice.  God had already revealed what forms of torture are just and prohibited through Mosaic Law long before Jesus came, and crucifixion falls into the category of unjust, depraved penalties.  Besides, this is a purely fallacious argument from one instance of silence on Jesus' part when he was struggling under unspeakable torture himself.

About Barabbas, the man who would have been on Jesus' cross, people have written:


"Barabbas should’ve had the stripes across his back – he should’ve been the one who was bruised and beaten; he should’ve been the one dangling naked from that cross [3]."

"Nailed to a wooden pole, naked, you are left to die in agony, gasping for your every breath until you can breath no more. Sometimes when they are in a hurry, they smash your legs with hammers, so, no longer able to support yourself, you hang by the hands until you can no longer breathe. And in that filthy prison cell, that was the fate that awaited me. They wonder why we hate them.

How I hated the Romans!

. . . He was dying in my place. It should have been me on that middle cross [4]."

"Barabbas knew that he was guilty and that he had done crimes worthy of death. He knew that he deserved to go to that cross . . . [5]."


Still others have stated extremely alarming things:


"The punishment Jesus received is the punishment we deserve, judicially. This is an unequivocal truth of the New Testament. So while we may want to call boiling in oil or running people into hungry wild beasts things the Romans did unjustly and without warrant, the Gospel Paul preaches tells us without any question that the just punishment we deserve as sinners looks like what Jesus received at the hands of the Jews and the Romans — a bloody beating, a public humiliation, a painful suffering, and death.

You cannot deny that Paul says that this is the punishment we deserve [6]."


Whoever wrote this has committed many fallacies and exegetical errors in his efforts to arrive at this erroneous conclusion.  Paul not only never condoned the Roman justice system at all but, as a Jewish theonomist, he would have opposed Roman ideals.  Mosaic Law resolutely and constantly condemns the very things involved in Roman crucifixion, and the belief that the Bible teaches even once that anyone deserves crucifixion for his or her sins is utterly asinine.  To believe these things I have quoted is to believe in complete bullshit that is contrary to Biblical teachings, and what many of these quoted authors are teaching or suggesting is approval or tolerance of one of the most unethical things I can imagine on the Christian moral system.  I am enraged that a self-proclaimed Christian would say such things.

If the experience of the the thief resembled that of Jesus, then he had been flogged horrifically, stripped naked and physically assaulted by mocking soldiers, reclothed, degraded by having to carry his cross through a hostile crowd, escorted to his public execution site, stripped naked again by eager soldiers, hurled against his cross on the ground, nailed to the cross, hoisted up painfully, his bones grinding against the nails as his body adjusted to the excruciating suffering that would so intimately accompany him for the remainder of his life.  He desperately panted and lifted his body and dropped it in order to obtain new breaths.  His body had been violated not only by the intense torture beforehand but by the involuntary confiscation of his clothing.  If his experience resembled what Cicero, Josephus, and other authors noted about crucifixion, soldiers may have impaled parts of his body and tortured him further while he hung suspended on the cross.  Maybe his cross was outfitted with a sedile, a seat extension that would absorb his weight and prevent him from falling below a certain point, therefore extending his ordeal greatly.  Perhaps soldiers had even nailed his penis to the sedile, as some appear to believe happened at times.

Did he truly deserve the punishment he received?  Can it ever be right to beat people brutally with a cat o' nine tails and fists, expose their naked bodies against their will, batter them with fists, and then nail them to crosses to allow them to endure unspeakable agony for up to days?  Not according to the Bible.  I will confront the idea that the thief or Barabbas deserved this treatment (or that anyone does), demolish it by proving that it is entirely incompatible with what the Bible itself clearly teaches about justice, and show that pastors are careless at best or evil when they repeat or imply this fallacious and unbiblical conclusion.


Crucifixion was meted out upon thieves and bandits, but Exodus did not prescribe any form of physical punishment for theft, much less execution or crucifixion.

As a robber the thief would have stolen from people and likely assaulted some of them in the process.  Roman law fastened the penalty of crucifixion and all that it entailed to any robber or robberess (robberess is my title for female robbers) caught by authorities.  One of the most obvious proofs that the thief on the cross made a false statement when he claimed he and the crucified thief on the other side of Jesus deserved crucifixion is the fact that the Bible itself appoints a drastically different penalty for thieves.  Of course, crucifixion cannot be Biblically deserved by anyone at all even if the speculation were verified that the two criminals in question were not ordinary thieves but guilty of sedition or murder, as I will prove later.

In Luke 10 one can find an adequate description of what thieves in the Roman era would likely have done.


Luke 10:30--"In reply Jesus said: 'A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers.  They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.'"


Now, below I have listed several verses detailing the authorized human punishments for these sins.


Exodus 22:1-4--"If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters or sells it, he must pay back five head of cattle for the ox and four sheep for the sheep.  If a thief is caught breaking in and is struck so that he dies, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed; but if it happens after sunrise, he is guilty of bloodshed.  A thief must certainly make restitution, but if he has nothing, he must be sold to pay for his theft.  If the stolen animal is found alive in his possession--whether ox or donkey or sheep--he must pay back double."

Exodus 21:18-19--"If men quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held responsible if the other gets up and walks around outside with his staff; however, he must pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed."


The repentant thief crucified with Christ could not possibly have "deserved" his fate: according to God's own moral revelation about how to punish thieves and simple batterers, the repentant thief should have merely repaid his victims for any robbery or assault he committed against them.  The only kind of "thief" whom Scripture demands the execution of is someone who steals a man or woman (Exodus 21:16, Deuteronomy 24:7), not someone who steals mere property of any kind.  Numbers 5, Leviticus 6, and other verses in Exodus 22 clarify the penalty for thieves further.  How fucking ignorant does someone have to be to represent the Bible as supportive of the Romans crucifying thieves?

Though for some reason historians and theologians have often
specifically insisted that the Romans did not crucify women
(without offering any evidence whatsoever), Josephus, for
example, recorded otherwise.  His Antiquities of the Jews mentions
(18:3) that a woman named Ide was crucified at the order of
Tiberius.  I doubt the same pastors who preach that the thieves
crucified beside Christ deserved their torture would make the
same claim if the thieves had happened to be women.

(These two pictures are screenshots from Spartacus that I myself
took.  They show two female characters, Thessela and Kore
respectively, being crucified.)

Crucifixion was intended to be as artificially-prolonged and degrading as possible, with crucifixions lasting hours or days.  Mosaic Law prescribes capital punishments that directly prohibit such cruelty.

Deuteronomy 21:22-23--"If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight.  Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse.  You must not desecrate the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance."


Mosaic Law permits the temporary hanging of a corpse on a tree after a criminal was executed, not methods of execution where a live person is nailed to a tree to suffer up to days of sleeplessness, severe sunburn, insect attacks, splinters from the cross, difficulty breathing, the cold of night, exhaustion, starvation, and deprivation of water, as well as the humiliation of forced nudity, having to urinate in a vulnerable position before groups of vicious mockers, and involuntary arousal of the sex organs.  Deuteronomy 21:22-23 does not condone crucifying someone and inflicting these tortures in the name of "justice".  On the contrary, it inescapably condemns doing so.


Deuteronomy 25:3--". . . but he must not give him more than forty lashes.  If he is flogged more than that, your brother will be degraded in your eyes."

Roman punishments were brutal and lacked regard for human rights
and the principles of ethics and justice revealed in Mosaic Law.  In
Rome one could be sentenced to damnatio ad bestias and be killed by
animals in the infamous Coliseum, crucified for the pleasure of
 a hostile crowd, or trapped inside a sack with various lethal
animals and thrown off of a high surface.

No punishment that degraded the offender is tolerated by Mosaic Law, as it in fact prohibits such penalties universally.  Even when sentencing murderers and murderesses and other capital criminals like kidnappers, rapists, sorceresses, capital perjurers and perjuresses, adulterers and adulteresses, people who strike their parents, and more, the Bible merely says to execute them and does not prescribe some horrifically torturous execution method, usually not even mentioning the form of death at all.

Some examples are below:


Exodus 21:12--"Anyone who strikes a man and kills him shall surely be put to death."

Exodus 21:15--"Anyone who attacks his father or his mother must be put to death."

Exodus 21:16--"Anyone who kidnaps another and either sells him or still has him when he is caught must be put to death."

Exodus 22:18--"Do not allow a sorceress to live."

Deuteronomy 22:25--"But if out in the country a man happens to find a girl pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die."


As you can see, people were not to torture kidnappers, rapists, sorceresses, batterers of parents, and murderers and murderesses.  These criminals were to simply be executed.  These passages never say to take a capital criminal and beat, taunt, and degrade him or her by subjecting him or her to a prolonged, hellacious, belittling death that requires hours or days to fully unfold.  To do so would make the executioners monsters more depraved than practically any of the criminals they kill.  God is morally perfect and cannot instruct anyone to sin (James 1:13), and thus the penalties prescribed in Mosaic Law cannot be unjust (Hebrews 2:2), for any deviation from justice is injustice and injustice is an evil that God condemns repeatedly in Scripture.


Crucifixion was exclusively reserved for non-citizens of Rome.  This contradicts a central ethical principle found in Exodus and Leviticus.

Exodus 22:21--"Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt."

Exodus 23:9--"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."

Leviticus 24:22--"You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born.  I am the Lord your God."


One of the great injustices and evils of Roman crucifixion was how Rome exclusively imposed it on those who were foreigners--those who had not been born a Roman citizen or paid money to obtain citizenship.  One of the benefits of citizenship was exemption from such horrific legal punishments.  The inconsistency and depravity of this is extremely apparent to anyone informed by Biblical ethics.  The Bible does not discriminate in punishment or in other ways against people of different ethnicities or nationalities, for all people bear God's image and have the same unalienable rights (Genesis 1:27).  Only a very stupid or very Biblically ignorant person would ever say otherwise, yet that is just what the idiots who defend Roman crucifixion do.


Crucifixion often followed unspeakably sadistic pre-crucifixion torture prohibited by the Bible such as perverse types of flogging, forced nudity, and physical assault and battery.  The flogging allowed by the Bible was explicitly limited to forty lashes or under and did not involve forced nudity, the cat o' nine tails, mocking, or physical assault and sexual harassment.

Matthew 27:26-31--"But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.  Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him.  They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head.  They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him.  'Hail, king of the Jews!' they said.  They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again.  After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him.  Then they led him away to crucify him."


This malicious, perverse, cruel, and degrading behavior perfectly embodies what Roman soldiers were renowned for and expected to do.  This was what preparing someone for crucifixion likely appeared like on a regular basis.  Not only did they illicitly flog men and women before crucifying them, they engaged in horrendous abuse like the example described above.  Everything about this contradicts what the Bible teaches about how to punish criminals.


Deuteronomy 25:1-3--"If men have a dispute, they are to take it to court and the judges will decide the case, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty.  If the guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall make him lie down and have him flogged in his presence with the number of lashes his crime deserves, but he must not give him more than forty lashes.  If he is flogged more than that, your brother will be degraded in your eyes."


Biblical flogging was never designed to injure or kill; it was never to exceed a fixed absolute limit; it was never to be paired with capital punishment for an agonizing double penalty; it was never intended or allowed to degrade the man or woman receiving lashes; it was not coupled with the sexual humiliation of forced nudity; it was not carried out away from the presence of the judge(s); it was not followed by physical battery with fists.  The only other instances where the Bible allows physical torture of any kind are found in Deuteronomy 25:11-12 and Exodus 21:23-25, with both passages permitting specified forms of permanent amputation of body parts for two particular crimes [7].


Exodus 21:18-19--"If men quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held responsible if the other gets up and walks around outside with his staff; however, he must pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed."


Roman soldiers could beat and physically abuse prisoners before their crucifixions as they did to Jesus.  This type of battery is itself punished in the Bible and is never prescribed as a just penalty, but is instead universally condemned.  If God condemns spontaneous battery during the context of a quarrel, he certainly condemns soldiers inflicting beatings on criminals and prisoners with their fists in addition to the illicit forms of flogging they carried out, especially when they derive actual pleasure and an arrogant sense of despicable pride from doing so.  No one deserves to be physically abused with this type of battery according to the Bible.  If a pastor attempts to justify these behaviors with some appeal to cultural relativism or utilitarian deterrence, he or she has ceased to correctly teach morality, and has embraced irrationality and extreme moral confusion.


Crucifixion could involve varying degrees of sexual abuse.  Anyone tortured by Roman soldiers faced possible rape before the nailing, and, at the very least, sexual violation in the form of forced nudity was part of the legal penalty.

Crucified men and women were suspended fully nude on their crosses.  There is nothing sinful about voluntarily displaying one's naked body in public (Genesis 2:25 with Genesis 1:31, Exodus 22:26-27, Isaiah 20:1-6, and so on), but to force someone to be naked is sinful and unjust, since it deviates from the standard of justice that corresponds to God's nature, the only moral authority, and since it degrades or aims to degrade the victim, which Deuteronomy 25:1-3 explicitly condemns.  Even worse, rape was possibly inflicted by the Roman torturers.  Recall the passage from Matthew cited above where the soldiers abused Jesus.  It seems they did not rape him according to that passage, but what of the other men and women sent to them?  If American men and women sexually tormented Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison facility and American prisons are known for housing rape and sexual abuse when America allegedly holds values that oppose these things, then I'm certain that Roman soldiers, who were known for rape and sadistic behavior and had no legal limitations imposed on their treatment of criminals and prisoners, had little against inflicting both forced sex and lesser sexual assaults on the criminals under their charge.

Deuteronomy makes it clear that no one deserves any form of sexual abuse and that sexual abusers of all kinds should be punished severely.  It prescribes the death penalty for all who force sex on others and even legislates that a woman's hand be cut off if she grabs a man's penis as part of a physical assault on him, even when she is attempting to save her husband from a fight.


Deuteronomy 22:25-27--"But if out in the country a man happens to meet a girl pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die.  Do nothing to the girl; she has committed no sin deserving death.  This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders his neighbor, for the man found the girl out in the country, and though the betrothed girl screamed, there was no one to rescue her."


According to this passage alone, no one is to be raped--not thieves, enemies of the state, murderers, rapists, captives, or innocent people.  Regardless of the identity of the aggressor or the victim or the circumstances, rape is inexcusable.  All rape is like murder and all murder is prescribed execution (Exodus 21:12-14).  Considering the vicious behavior the gospel narratives and historical records ascribe to Roman soldiers, it is indeed very possible that they raped crucifixion victims prior to their execution.  Regardless of anyone's claimed justification for rape, God called it something at least equal to murder in its depravity and demanded the capital punishment of anyone who rapes another person.


Deuteronomy 25:11-12--"If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand.  Show her no pity."


The assault described in Deuteronomy 25:11-12 is not intrinsically sexual, but it does follow that if the described assault is sinful then assaulting someone's genitals in other situations is also sinful.  If God specifically informed us to punish a woman for abusing or even seizing a man's penis to overpower him when that man is committing battery against her or her husband, he certainly would not approve of sadistic, psychopathic soldiers sexually exploiting the forced nudity of the men and women sent to them for preparation for their executions.  Punishment for all forms of sexual assault and abuse are demanded by Mosaic Law, not used as punishment for any crime.  I am enraged when pastors condemn voluntary nonsexual public nudity from their pulpits with their fallacious reasoning and poor exegesis of the Bible and then speak about how the thieves crucified with Jesus deserved their sentences, which included having their nudity forcibly exposed against their wills.  This is blatant hypocrisy and a logical inconsistency.  Anyone who would preach this is a damn fool.

These cinematic depictions of crucifixion for separate TV shows are
inaccurate.  Men and women crucified by the Romans were deprived
of their clothes and had their bodies forcibly exposed against their wills,
with the mandatory sexual humiliation compounding the torture.  It is
astonishing how many Christians agree with statements like "The thieves
on the cross deserved crucifixion"--knowingly or unknowingly condoning
forced nudity--while simultaneously holding to erroneous ideas that
 voluntary, nonsexual public nudity is a sin [8].

(These two pictures are screenshots from Spartacus and The Bible that I
myself took.)

Conclusion


Rome was a bastion of injustice, cruelty, barbarism, and and abuse.  I have rarely seen any Christians other than theonomists and reconstructionists condemn Roman punishments and the depravity of crucifixion, but the Bible itself contradicts those who say that the thieves crucified with Jesus "received what they deserved" on every level.  I did not merely conjure up a single verse or a set of verses from the New Testament commanding us to love our enemies and use it to attempt to formulate a speculative case against the supposed "justice" of Roman crucifixion; I have thoroughly demonstrated that Biblical morality and justice vomits out the belief that such a punishment could ever be just.  No one--not the thieves like those crucified beside Jesus or traitors or murderers or any other criminals--can deserve the vile mistreatment associated with Roman crucifixion.  The Bible and reason condemn pastors who insist otherwise.

It is very interesting that people who ignore Old Testament moral revelation in favor of that of the New Testament are usually far more willing to advocate the idea that the thieves who died beside Jesus deserved to be crucified, that eternal conscious torment is both just and Biblical, and that there are few objective moral guidelines that govern the administration of criminal punishment in the "New Testament era".  Theonomists strongly object to several of these beliefs, citing Old Testament ethical revelation.  As I proved, there is no Biblical basis for the cultural relativism concerning judicial punishments that some Christians remain comfortable with.  I remember years ago reading about contrary positions on the morality of crucifying the thieves, and I was horrified and infuriated that Christians of all people would ever defend such a cruel practice; now I see just how fallacious, erroneous, and evil such defenses of crucifixion are.


[1].  http://www.andybox.com/?page_id=396

[2].  http://thirdparadigm.org/doc_jesusrebelorimperialist.php

[3].  https://joshuarogers.com/2015/04/03/jesus-loved-barabbas-this-i-know/

[4].  http://www.buccleuchfreechurch.co.uk/he-died-my-death.html

[5].  http://www.middletownbiblechurch.org/lifeochr/lifeoc14.htm

[6].  https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/01/open-letter-to-jmr-a-preamble-to-the-discussion-on-torture

[7].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/bible-on-torture-part-2.html

[8].  To learn why these ideas are Biblically and intellectually unsound and irrational, see here:
  A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-folly-of-modesty-part-1.html
  B.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-folly-of-modesty-part-2.html
  C.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/bible-on-nudity-part-1.html